There’s a new service that will help you reveal your interests in a man or a woman named SubwayCrush. The service currently serves NYC, London, San Francisco, Boston and Chicago. The idea is simple…find someone on the train you are interested in, write up the person’s specs on SubwayCrush and then the person might just answer. Naturally the more people who know about, and use, SubwayCrush, the better chance you have for a match.

You can view all “crushes” by city or by type (e.g m4w, m4m, w4m, w4w). You must enter the rail line you were on when you found your crush — this helps narrow down who it might be. I hear stories all the time about people finding love on the subway. I did a search for “hot male entrepreneur who also runs a tech blog” on a few of the subway lines in NYC but I came up empty.

I am guessing at some point they will add the ability to post photos – which might be a bit creepy. They should also add the ability to signup for alerts based on location and/or subway line.

The service was created by NY-based Lolz.

In these current times, a variety of applications have appeared to make website and document reviews easier. There’s ProofHQ based in the UK, ConceptShare out of Canada, and Argentinian-based ColaabFlow.

A new feedback application has hit the private beta scene recently named Notable. Notable describes their service as, “Quickly and easily give feedback on design, content, and code on any page of a website or application without leaving your browser. Notable helps your team collaborate through visual feedback on screenshots, via a chaos-free process so that everyone can express their opinion.”

There is also a browser plugin which allows you to bring any webpage into Notable for group review and annotation. This can be helpful when analyzing the competition with your team. I like how they build permissions into the system which allow for certain team members to see the designs at certain times. Notable also offers a historical dashboard which can be used to “remember” decisions from previous reviews.

Monthly plans range from $44-119 and Notable offers a free account which is limited to three users and one workspace.

Also…have a look at our CreationFlow, ProofHQ and ConceptShare coverage.

My video experience is posted below – I left out the piece from inside their office. I spoke with a couple of Twitter employees who told me that you can’t get on the list by delivering cupcakes. Apparently you either get on the list if you are an “editor’s pick” or if you get a big boost in “velocity” which means that you get massive followers in a short time.

Tomorrow I will explain why I think that having default lists on any service is a good thing – except when they are used the way Twitter (and to a big extent Friendfeed) are using the lists. I have put some of my thoughts in the video below.

Thanks to everyone who participated in my fun posts over the past week!

On the other hand, last night I had dinner at the Cheesecake Factory. While waiting for my food to arrive, I took a walk over to their cheesecake display and filmed the video below. After checking out how sweet the cakes looked, I am now wondering if a thick slice of one of the cakes in the video might actually work better. Perhaps these cakes would get not only me on the default list but another user of my choosing! Like a cupcake is equal to one default list user and a cheesecake slice is worth one plus a friend?

Any input is greatly appreciated!

I am staying in downtown San Francisco but am willing to travel for best results. So if you are interested in meeting, shooting some startup videos and rapping about other tech blogs, leave your thoughts on local and preferred time in the comments.

Also – should you decide to place an order with my startup, bring your business cards with you to the CNup and grab a cool bonus 20% extra cards for your order.

I’ve heard stories about how tough it is to actually get any help from Twitter’s customer service but until recently I haven’t had a need to contact them for help. In January, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone heralded their great support department on the Twitter blog so I was certainly hoping for a quick resolution to my issue.

Here’s an overview of my issue and why I’ve contacted support for help. I am having an issue with my @cloudcontacts account. For some reason, I can’t get the account to work correctly. Half of the time when I load twitter.com, I get a login box which won’t let me login. However if I just refresh the page enough times (never the same number), eventually it lets me in. Direct messages never show up correctly, and when people try to access the page for the @cloudcontacts account, they too get a "That page doesn’t exist!" message but if you refresh that page, you eventually get the account too (although today the account seems to not show up as many times as I refresh). I can’t reset the password because it gets stuck in this "no account/yes account" problem. I’ve tried to create a new @cloudcontacts account – the registration page says it’s available, but on submission, it says it’s taken.

I went ahead and submitted an issue ticket (which was hell because they want you to be logged in which as you can see above only works on random loads). I received a quick auto-reply with a message about passwords but nothing about what happens next. I replied to that message asking for additional help but heard nothing back. This week I submitted another ticket with more specific details about the issue after the research I did. This time I didn’t receive a password auto-reply, instead, I received the following reply:

Your request has been received, and is being reviewed by our support staff. Twitter Support is currently experiencing a backlog: in some cases, it may be 5 to 7 business days before you receive a reply. Problems and issues will be investigated first, followed by general requests and questions.

Does this mean I will receive any help? My issue is certainly a "problem" and not a general request or question. Based on the people who emailed me after my first tweet about the issue, the answer is "who knows". Orli Yakuel of the popular Go2Web20 directory has a good post about the (lack of) support that Twitter provides. She’s waiting over a month as are countless others pleading for help.

I’ve tried twittering/messaging to the Twitter founders but they haven’t replied either.

Here’s a company that is in their honeymoon period where blogs and mainstream media can’t get enough of the service (more on that later). Twitter has raised $55 million dollars in funding. If there is a backlog of support issues as the auto-reply states, why not take a tiny bit of cash, hire 10-20 support people for a week, and get the backlog resolved? I am willing to bet that the majority of support issues would take minutes to resolve or answer and more customers would be satisfied.

Let’s forget about the customer for a minute and think about if we were working at Twitter. How great would it be to get the queue cleared out so we don’t have to see a backlog everyday and could focus on the product?

The interesting thing here is that Twitter is heralded as this great platform for providing customer service with major companies like Zappos, Dell, Comcast, Mosso and JetBlue using the service for support. Yet the underlying platform company doesn’t provide the same level of support for the companies who use their platform.

I am sharing this long story for one reason: for you to take a moment and think about the support you provide on your web applications. Are you making sure each and everyday that your customers are satisfied with the support you provide?

My hope is that the issue listed above is resolved expeditiously so I can use the account to communicate with my customers and during the SXSW festival. I will report back once the issue is resolved.

With that said, the winner is:

Deanna R from Buffalo, New York

If for some reason Deanna cannot fulfill the duties of winner, then the alternate winner is Rajiv D from San Francisco. I will be in contact with Deanna shortly to confirm her attendance.

A few of you asked about covering the event as press for CN and I will follow up with ya’all in the coming week. Thanks to everyone who participated!

The Web 2.0 Expo will be held in San Francisco this year and is just a month away. CN is a media sponsor of the event and I was able to get the O’Reilly and TechWeb teams to give me one full conference pass to give away to a CN Reader. If you would like the pass, submit your information and on February 15, 2009 we will pick a winner.

If you would like to cover the event for CN, let me know as well. Check out our previous Web 2.0 Expo coverage.

Enter Here for the conference pass by sending in your contact info.

According to BusinessWeek reporter Steve Hamm, "A road trip finds risk aversion, short-term thinking, and a few bold ideas." Given that some believe technological innovation is going to lead the United States out of its economic mess and restore its global competitiveness, those aren’t exactly the findings one probably wanted to receive.

I, of course, have been criticizing Silicon Valley for some time on The Drama 2.0 Show. While Valley inhabitants have celebrated consumer Internet startups like Facebook and Twitter and have demonstrated irrational exuberance over businesses they clearly don’t understand ( like energy), as an outsider I haven’t been able to help but notice that there hasn’t been much real innovation taking place.

This isn’t entirely surprising. Scientists and experienced technologists in the Valley have been forced to compete with hipsters and Harvard dropouts. Forward-thinking venture capitalists have been forced to share Sand Hill Road with young VCs who carry MBAs and list companies like McKinsey and Bain on their resumes. Substance has been forced to compete with hype. A desire to build real companies that produce real wealth in the form of profit has been forced to compete with the desire to "fund and flip."

Former Intel CEO Andy Grove has a bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering. He was Intel’s third employee and did more for IBM during his career than perhaps any other person.

In his article, BusinessWeek’s Hamm relates Grove’s frustration at the state of Silicon Valley. Grove tells Hamm:

Intel never had an exit strategy. These days, people cobble something together. No capital. No technology. They measure eyeballs and sell advertising. Then they get rid of it. You can’t build an empire out of this kind of concoction. You don’t even try.

Cobbling something together. Hmm. Do you hear that, Paul Graham?

If you have followed the voices in the blogosphere, the Twittersphere, the mainstream media and the conference trail over the past several years, you may have been led to believe that there was a golden era in Silicon Valley.

Innovation was everywhere. Lower barriers to entry made it easier to launch a new company and raise financing on favorable terms. A more "democratic" funding environment made it possible for virtual nobodies to play ball. And the struggles of stodgy old companies in dinosauric industries somehow inured to the benefit of Silicon Valley upstarts looking to dethrone them.

I’m sure the excitement was palpable for those who found themselves in the midst of the second coming of the Internet but as an outsider, it was difficult for me to see how the companies and trends Silicon Valley was latching onto were all that important. How were social networks going to revolutionize an already sophisticated, complex and competitive global ad market? How were microblogging services going to revolutionize personal communications? How was citizen journalism going to replace the expensive exercise of covering the news without the financial resources held by major media organizations?

The bigger question I had: how was any of this going to make the type of money the venture capitalists funding it needed it to?

It wasn’t, and now that this is clear to all but those who rely on social networks, social media, citizen journalism, et. al., to pay the bills, the question for Silicon Valley becomes: where did we go wrong? There are a number of contributors to the flawed thinking that is now pervasive in Silicon Valley.

The Allure of Advertising Masks A Lack of Innovation

I’m not sure why everyone in Silicon Valley is so enamored with advertising as a business model. Perhaps it’s that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and VCs have heard such fabulous things about the parties major brands and ad agencies throw at the Super Bowl and they hope that they’ll one day be invited. Or perhaps they like the fact that, on paper, advertising revenues seem potentially unlimited. The more you grow, the more you can make.

A great formula comes into focus: give something "cool" away for free, spark viral growth, hit critical mass, sell lots of advertising, profit. If only it were that simple.

To be sure, the advertising market is absolutely huge. And if you think like a VC, all you need is to capture a small sliver of it to make a lot of money. But selling advertising can be a real bitch and there’s a reason that it’s the big who tend to get bigger in this market. The existence of massive ad spend doesn’t guarantee you’re going to get any of it, there’s still a lot that’s driven by relationships, buying is cyclical and, of course, as everyone is now realizing (again): the fate of the advertising market is correlated quite closely with the fate of the economy.

The reality: ad-supported businesses have been so popular in Silicon Valley of late because the Valley folk have known, either consciously or unconsciously, that there aren’t a whole lot of people willing to pay a whole lot of money for most of the products and services they’re developing.

The best innovations are rarely subsidized by advertising. Because innovations offer a new way of doing something – whether more effectively, more efficiently or at lower cost – they’re typically something their end users will pay for.

Let’s consider a handful of the greatest innovations of the 20th century, as named by Forbes: sneakers, the television, the mass spectrometer, the personal computer, frozen food, the transistor, point of sales data, the discount brokerage firm, Tupperware, "the pill", the disposable diaper, the catalytic converter, the world wide web.

How many of these are paid for by their end users? All of them. For those interested in the subject of innovation, it’s an instructive exercise to go through Forbes’ list of the 20th century’s greatest innovations and to place each one of them in one of two columns: paid or ad-supported.

After doing so, you might be inclined to agree with Drama’s Law: the more innovative a product or service, the more willing its end user is likely to be to pay for it.

Unless you’re clueless and believe that this trend will change in the 21st century (even as we head into a deep recession), the question must be asked: why are so many of the Silicon Valley personalities widely publicized as being at the forefront of "innovation" spending so much time working on "innovations" that they clearly don’t believe end users would find valuable enough to pay for?

The logical answer: these people are not at the forefront of innovation.

Bubble 2.0, Stupid VCs and Short-Term Thinking

As the financial crisis unfolded, a lot of Web 2.0 types shouted "This isn’t our bubble!" To be sure, overvalued tech stocks didn’t produce the first half of the mother of all financial meltdowns (yes, there’s more to come). But to understand why Silicon Valley has been overrun by "me three" companies that produce little real innovation and even fewer profits, you need to understand that venture capitalists were able to raise such large amounts of money because of the economic bubble that was inflating around them. As I’ve stated before, Silicon Valley isn’t a walled garden insulated from the global economy.

The limited partners who invested huge sums of money in the venture capital "asset class" over the past decade have largely been the same entities (i.e. pension funds, funds of funds, wealthy individuals, etc.) that were beneficiaries of the inflationary system that produced all of the economy’s illusory wealth in the first place. It was a vicious cycle: as almost every asset class rose in value, there was far more money to pump into all the asset classes.

This did three things in Silicon Valley: it led to oversize VC funds, it led to more VC firms and it led to a "fund and flip" mentality.

It’s important to recognize that most VCs are not investors so much as they are money managers paid by their limited partners to allocate capital, and like most money managers, they are prone to herd mentality. A trend develops and before you know it, every VC wants exposure to the trend, especially if there has been any M&A activity that supports the notion that a lucrative new market is emerging. When there are too many firms with too much money chasing too few ideas, herd mentality can be a very destructive thing.

First, lots of capital piles on in areas where it really isn’t needed. One need look no further than the number of social networks and video sharing services that have been funded over the past four years as an example. Today, there are a handful of winners and potential winners in these spaces and a whole lot of losers. Hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars that could have been allocated to more worthwhile investments were instead wasted on acquiring "exposure" to hot trends in hopes of funding the next YouTube or MySpace. This explains why VCs have been taking in more money than they’re generating in returns.

Second, herd mentality discourages forward-thinking investments. Remember: venture capitalists are money managers, not true investors. They therefore have a great incentive not to stray from the herd. If you’re a money manager and every other money manager you’re competing with is investing in social networks, online video, solar or biofuels, investing in "oddball" companies that are trying to do something different and bold is a potential liability. If those companies don’t succeed, you don’t have the plausible deniability that is created by looking like all the other members of the herd.

Exacerbating the problem is the fact that most VCs are ill-equipped to spot something truly unique and forward-thinking. The word "innovation" is thrown around so much by VCs that it’s clear they have no clue. The word itself is almost meaningless in Silicon Valley these days.

Which isn’t surprising. Look at the website of most VC firms and you’ll inevitably find more MBAs and finance types than you will mechanical engineers and physicists. You’re far more likely to meet a VC who went to Stanford and worked at McKinsey than you are to meet a VC who went to CalTech and worked at the Department of Energy. While you don’t need to be a scientist to recognize innovation, if you’re funding biofuels companies, for instance, it probably helps if you have more exposure to, say, chemical engineering than financial engineering. That makes it a little bit easier to spot a technology with real potential instead of one that will serve as the basis for a hot PowerPoint.

So what do you do when you’re clueless, flush with cash and find yourself in the middle of a bubble economy? Fund and flip, baby.

Why go out of your way to fund companies that are bold but risky? Why fund companies that have substantive potential but may take years to realize it? When times are good, VCs have little reason to take intelligent risk. Big jackpots that produce immediate returns, which VCs got their first widespread taste of in the late 1990s, seem well within reach. And since everybody loves easy money, "fund and flip" is a lot sexier than "fund and fiddle." It’s good for VCs, it’s good for their limited partners and it’s good for entrepreneurs who have a simple pitch (i.e. "we run a YouTube for dance that was co-founded by MC Hammer").

In short, it pretty much boils down to this: if the VC market had a healthier (read: smaller) number of firms and a healthier (read: lower) amount of capital available to invest, the venture capital "asset class" could have remained the niche asset class of technology innovation that it should have been instead of yet another get-rich-quick scam. Capital would have been allocated more selectively to forward-thinking companies by more knowledgeable VCs.

Conclusion

If Silicon Valley was a corporation named Silicon Valley Inc. (SVI), I’d provide the following advice: hire a turnaround expert and retain a new PR firm. Now.

SVI needs a new direction. Its strategy is shot and the products it has lost much of its relevance in the marketplace. And before you think that cleantech is the answer, consider that a shockingly large percentage of the Silicon Valley eco-entrepreneurs don’t seem to realize that Moore’s Law doesn’t apply to energy.

There’s also a lot of dead weight in Silicon Valley. From hipster CEOs like Kevin Rose, who, after 4 years and no profits, relayed to BusinessWeek that Digg is "stepping up its innovation game", to VCs who don’t know the difference between a proton and an electron, SVI needs to re-examine its recruiting practices. Metaphorically-speaking, there are far more people sitting around the water cooler than there are productive employees.

In short, SVI’s turnaround expert will help it define its core competencies, refocus on them and cut the slackers.

Once that’s done, SVI’s new PR firm will help ensure that Silicon Valley is sending the right messages to stakeholders, the public and the media. No more hyping novelties and no more "How This Kid Made $60 Million in 18 Months" cover stories.

SVI would instead highlight all the substantive innovation it is engaging in. It might even earn a cover story that reads "How This Technology Saved The Department of Defense $600 Million in 18 Months." But it would never lose sight of the fact that it’s job isn’t to inspire people with press releases and fluff but to help individuals and businesses while making a profit.

Fortunately, SVI does not need to restructure completely from the ground up. There is innovation taking place. Large companies like IBM and Intel haven’t thrown in the towel on R&D. And there are entrepreneurs, like Jeff Hawkins, the creator of the Palm Pilot and the Treo, who are working on bold new ideas. Hawkins’ newest startup, Numenta, which BusinessWeek mentioned in its article, is developing a computer memory system modeled after the human neocortex. It hasn’t raised venture capital. Apparently most VCs just can’t wrap their heads around the concept (no pun intended).

Of course, IBM, Intel and Numenta aren’t as sexy as Facebook, Digg and Twitter or all of the cleantech companies that are holding off on their innovations until a government bailout arrives, but if SVI wants sex appeal, it should change its name to Silicone Valley Inc. and relocate its corporate headquarters about 350 miles south to the San Fernando Valley. At the very least, the companies in Chatsworth could teach it a thing or two about making money.

The change I’ve noticed the most is that more stories are receiving "lead" status with no visible links. I am guessing this is where the editor plays the biggest role. She can make stories live immediately versus waiting for the algorithm to pick them up and do it’s magic of link association. Oh yea, bitchmemes (staged or real) are apparently an excellent way to boost a blog’s standings on the leaderboard.

Many seemed to believe that Michael Arrington, holder of the top slot (then and now), was nervous that the leaderboard would change based on a post he authored after the news was made public. Marshall Kirkpatrick discussed the Techmeme advertising model and the hiring of a woman as the first editor. Susan Mernit also looks at the revenue model and provides some Techmeme revenue estimates for 2008.

Several new sites are listed on the current leaderboard but weren’t on the list as of December 5th. They are: InternetNews, jkOnTheRun, TUAW, TheOpenRoad, InsideFacebook, Loic LeMeur Blog, Agence France Presse, Google Mobile Blog, Hardware 2.0, DSLReports, PE Hub Blog, Zero Day, Lifehacker, Gawker (probably took over for Valleywag), Fast Company, Inquirer, Apple, TmoNews, Tech Daily Dose, The Bivings Report, Scobleizer, Telegraph, Hitwise Intelligence, Louis Gray, and The Digital Home.

For reference here’s the Techmeme leaderboard as of December 5, 2008 and January 4, 2009:

Update: Liz Gannes says Seesmic has about 13 employees after those let go today.

Seesmic has raised $12 million in venture capital funding to-date. Loic has created a video to explain about the headcount reduction:

Tough times. Tough decisions.also read my blog post http://www.loiclemeur.com/english/2008/10/tough-times-tou.html

Best of luck to everyone who was let go – if I can be of any assistance with connections, let me know.

The Ad Revenue conference will focus on helping publisher and ad networks fill unsold inventory. AdFlex is setup to serve ad networks and their need to fill certain inventory buckets. Rajeev notes that sometimes ad networks need to shrink and expand their inventory to meet a specific client need. AdFlex provides the inventory from PubMatic publishers to fill the inventory. To some extent this makes PubMatic an ad network. The discussion about AdFlex begins at the 4 minute mark in the video below.

Cramer explained how the application works — basically you enter a search query on Google or Yahoo as you always do. You select a search result and go to that page. If that page isn’t what you were looking for, when you come back to the search result, Surf Canyon looks at results 11-1000 and then recommends other results similar to the one you clicked on. It ignores results you skipped over because it recognizes you weren’t interested in those results. Cramer noted that the idea is to make search results dynamic instead of the static results that Google and Yahoo provide by default.

Surf Canyon has raised $600k in angel funding, has 3 full time employees and several consultants.

The Surf Canyon application is installed via a Firefox/Internet Explorer addon. Cramer tells me that there’s been 250,000 downloads of the addon to-date. I asked Cramer about how he is marketing the search application because clearly mainstream Internet users just go to Google or Yahoo for search. He said that a large percentage of their marketing has come via word of mouth and that once users use the application they find it beneficial and share it with others. They have also been listed as a featured download in the Firefox addon catalog. The key to success for Surf Canyon is to continue to raise awareness of their application across the mainstream market.

CenterNetworks will be heading West from September 7-14th and will spend the majority of the time in San Francisco.

I thought it would be exciting to hold the 2nd annual CenterNetworks West Coast Brunch on Saturday, September 13 at 10AM local time. Let’s all get together, eat some good food, and talk Web.

Please register here for the brunch (only if you plan on attending so I can keep an accurate headcount!):

• http://cnbrunch2008.eventbrite.com

If you are interested in hosting or sponsoring the brunch, please send me a note. Would be awesome to meet at a local startup! I will post updates as we move closer to the brunch. Thanks and I look forward to meeting everyone in person!

Once an account is setup, employees can select from the 200 restaurants and caterers that GetQuik partners with. Administrators can setup pre-defined meals making future orders easier. GetQuik also offers help with selecting the right meal for the right business function. GetQuik notes that AMD is their first large customer of this new corporate catering service.

I could see this working well for medium-sized startups. Setup an account with GetQuik and the staff can order using the account making it easy for everyone to get the food that they like plus it would help with keeping accurate records (instead of a box of receipts) for tax time.

Check out our mobile food ordering review with GetQuik, SeamlessWeb, CampusFood and NY-based GoMobo.